CHAPTER THREE

EARLY DAYS DURING THE BORDER WAR

South Africa’s Border War began in earnest for Neall Ellis in December 1975. Posted for an eight-week tour to the Ondangua—the regional air force base in northern South-West Africa (Namibia today), he was to work closely with elements of South Africa’s Airborne, the Parachute Battalion or, in the lingo, the ‘Parabats’.

As he recalls, just about everything that happened in this regional conflict filtered through to the operations room, commonly known as the ‘Ops Room’. Although it sounded grand, it was little more than a tin shack with a cement floor that for most of the year was more akin to a sauna than an important operational planning centre.

The conflict sometimes took hostilities behind enemy lines and considerable distances beyond internationally recognised frontiers (to the consternation of Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Nations). The South African Army also went into Zambia and Mozambique several times. There were more clandestine raids further afield, with South African Navy Daphne Class submarines dropping Special Forces strike teams off the coasts of some of South Africa’s most outspoken enemies, Tanzania and Angola.

The war lasted a full generation, about 24 years in all, and by the time it all ended, thousands of sons had followed in the footsteps of their fathers and experienced military service. Although casualty figures throughout this conflict were modest, this was largely due to the immense area (by European standards) across which it was fought. There were hostilities in one form or another from the appropriately named Skeleton Coast on the Atlantic Ocean, to a tiny point on the map 1,500km to the east where the frontiers of three nations—South-West Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia)—conjoined.

Actual numbers of fatalities and wounded are difficult to assess accurately, in part because the Angolans never opened their archives to the outside world. The South African Army and Air Force (there were few SA Navy casualties because, apart from the briefly resuscitated South African Marines, there were almost no naval personnel directly involved) lost fewer than 800 men during the conflict, roughly three or four a month. The enemy had a casualty rate that was many times that.

In South-West Africa itself, it was the preponderant Ovambo tribal people who initially set the scene for conflict. Always against what they regarded as Pretoria’s illegal occupation of their country, they protested at the UN, and when that didn’t achieve any results, they asked several African countries for military help to displace what they termed the ‘hated racist oppressors’.

Although the Ovambos were regarded by the South Africans as ‘primitive and tribal’ (this was former apartheid government minister Pik Botha’s off-the-cuff phrase, which he used when attending the International Court of Justice at The Hague), they were anything but. Certainly, this African nation followed all the traditional tribal norms, but they were also single-minded in their efforts to dislodge the South African presence from their land. Thus, by the time the war started, they had formed their own political party, the South-West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO), and sent batches of troops for military training abroad.

To bring matters properly into perspective, it is essential to look back a little. Pretoria had originally occupied the old German colony of Deutsch-Südwestafrika by right of conquest during World War I. That territory was entrusted to Pretoria by a League of Nations mandate. Efforts had already started after the end of World War II to neutralise South African jurisdiction in South-West Africa, but Pretoria hung on resolutely, at one stage even suggesting that the country was already a de facto fifth province of South Africa.

It was then that a group of Ovambo tribal leaders took matters in hand. Having viewed the ongoing ‘colonial’ war in Angola to the immediate north, and what was then going on in Rhodesia, as precedents, they started a military struggle of their own. Thus a low-key guerrilla struggle was launched in 1965. The consensus was that if Pretoria was not prepared to listen to reason, SWAPO guerrillas, armed and abetted by Moscow and China, would engage Pretoria militarily and force it to relinquish control of South Africa, which was eventually to become Namibia. Obviously, the South Africans viewed all these developments as preposterous.

At the heart of the guerrilla military effort was the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), SWAPO’s military wing. Although some modern historians tend to denigrate PLAN’s efforts, we now know, with the benefit of hindsight, that with dollops of foreign financial and military aid, this moderate-sized group of freedom fighters was finally moulded into an extremely competent and dedicated group of guerrillas. How else could they have kept South Africa—the continent’s most advanced industrial country—on a partial war footing for more than two decades?

The war began slowly. A total of six dissident Ovambos, armed with Soviet carbines, infiltrated a remote corner of their tribal homeland in 1965 and established a temporary base. The idea was that more fighters, on their way overland on foot from Zambia through Portuguese Angola (then already in its fifth year of hostilities), would join them. The camp itself, which would become a touchstone of SWAPO leader Sam Nujoma’s liberation folklore, was called Ongulumbashe.

The operation launched to tackle these ‘infiltrators’ mainly consisted of members of the South African Police, with a small army detachment, together with elements from the South African Air Force. The initial operation became known in southern African military lore as Operation Blouwildebees. By contemporary standards, the strike was little more than a token effort, launched from what was then still an isolated northern administrative outpost at Ruacana, a small town that straddled the great Kunene River, which had headwaters to the north in Angola. Had it taken place in later years, it would probably have warranted little more than a footnote. South African military historian, Paul Els, wrote a book about it.2

The main force comprised four police officers, together with 37 other ranks. There were also four army officers, of whom one was a doctor, and seven NCOs. The South African Air Force contribution was nine, almost all of them pilots. To reduce weight, the eight Alouette helicopters involved in the operation were deployed without their usual complement of flight techs and were able to uplift five men each. It was the first time Alouette helicopters had been used in an offensive role.

By the time the Border War was over, it was estimated that almost half-a-million South Africans had experienced some form of military service, many along a succession of the country’s embattled northern frontiers. On the Angolan side, the tally is said to have exceeded a million men in uniform, and cumulatively, over more than a dozen years of fighting, included a couple of hundred thousand Cubans. Their casualties, never confirmed, were rated by unofficial sources in Havana to have totalled into five figures, many more from tropical illnesses such as malaria, typhus, meningitis and typhoid than from actual combat.

There were also scores of Cuban, Soviet, East German and other communist air crews killed during the course of hostilities, a significant number by American Stinger MANPADS1introduced into this African theatre of hostilities by the CIA in an effort to counter Moscow’s gains. The South Africans did their bit by handing over to anti-government UNITA guerrillas almost all the weapons captured in operations such as Operations Protea, Modular, Askari, Super and others.

SAM-7 (Strela-2) man-portable, shoulder-fired missiles captured during these ground operations—and there were dozens of them, similar to the U.S. Army tail-chasing REDEYEs—also went to UNITA and, by all accounts, they did enough damage to cause Cuban and Eastern-Bloc pilots to fly well beyond the estimated 4.2km slant-range of these weapons. That was in sharp contrast to South African military pilots who liked to operate as close to the ground as possible.

Although the Angolans also had low-altitude SAM systems, they hardly ever achieved a lock-on because the South African helicopters were rarely around long enough to become targets, or they hung so low over the forest that heavy foliage interfered with the sighting ability of those handling these weapons. In fact, during the entire war, while there were numerous SAAF aircraft and helicopters brought down by ground fire, not a single South African (or Rhodesian) helicopter was shot down by SAMs. It wasn’t for want of trying. In one major contact during Operational Super in March 1982, Neall Ellis in his Alouette gunship dodged three successive SAM-7s fired in about 90 seconds.

As with most wars, much of the day-to-day activity in South Africa’s operational area in South-West Africa was routine.

By the time that Nellis arrived at Ondangua, low-key military activity in the region had been on the go for several years. His first deployments came while his helicopter squadron worked with the South African adaptation of the Rhodesian fire force: only Pretoria called it Reaction Force.

The day would start before dawn, with pilots accompanied by their flight engineers and servicing personnel carefully going over their choppers along the flight line. Banter across the hardstand was mostly light-hearted, usually between aircrew and members of the parachute battalion, some of the men taking bets on the possibility of a contact during the day.

The Parabats were active too, checking equipment and filling water bottles. Everything they took into battle had to be secured to prevent loss in the furious activity that usually preceded a contact and afterwards. Once both aircrews and troops were satisfied that everything was in working order, pilots and stick leaders would gather for a preliminary briefing in the operations room.

Typically, the first task of the day would be for crews to remain on standby for an area operation to the immediate north of the base. Other units had been taken in some hours before, cordoned off specific areas and systematically started searching villages—kraals in the argot—while looking for insurgents and weapons caches.

Operational experience gained in both the Rhodesian and South-West African Wars was a major factor in the war. Experience had proved that the most efficient method of gathering information on insurgent movements was to either deploy observation posts or send in clandestine patrols (usually disguised as insurgents) to reconnoitre an area where information about an enemy presence might have been received from other sources.

The area was given boundaries and all movement in and out of the place frozen. This meant that no other security force operations could take place while the military remained active there. The same applied to air traffic: aircraft had either to fly at height over the area, or avoid it altogether.

Patrols sometimes spent days observing local villages from a distance. They would move closer at night and even enter villages to gather information. Obviously, the work was dangerous and only Special Forces troops trained in clandestine operations were employed for the task. Once insurgents were detected, the patrol would make contact with headquarters overnight and the next phase of bringing in ground troops would begin at first light.

Ideally, the composition of a combat ground force team in the Border War was an infantry company, similar to that of a rifle company, with three platoons of three sections of between eight and 14 men each. Each section should have a trained tracker—usually a bushman—and an interpreter for liaison with Ovambo-speaking civilians.

Numbers were essential in the kind of open country in which this war was fought. Because groups of men could be spotted from great distance at even a moderate altitude, most guerrilla movements took place during the dark hours. Should there be a contact during the day, the gunships would be in their element. The bush in South-West Africa is flat and virtually featureless, which made low-level aerial navigation extremely difficult. Nellis commented:

We dealt with navigation in our own way by initially using 1:250 000 scale maps to an easily recognisable point on the map then, for more accurate navigation to the contact point, we used 1:50 000 scale maps or, quite often, aerial photographs. Because of uniformity and a basic lack of navigation features, we used heading and time and always allowed for wind. Although this might have been regarded as a thumb-suck procedure, the majority of pilots knew the area well enough to be able to navigate quite accurately to the point of destination. In contrast, during the Rhodesian War pilots were thoroughly familiar with their areas of operation and only after they had reached the contact area would they bother to utilize maps for the final run in to target. Of course, that was possible because of the undulating nature of the Rhodesian countryside: on the Angolan frontier we had none of that.

Nellis’ Air Force component at Ondangua consisted of an Alouette III command-and-control helicopter (armed with a .303 machine gun) piloted by the mission leader. It would also carry the ground commander, who usually held the rank of major or above. For close air support along Angolan border regions, two Alouette III gunships armed with 20mm MG-151 cannon were preferred.

Along with the Reaction Force gunships there were the troopers, usually two or three Puma helicopters armed with door-mounted 7.62mm light machine guns. For visual reconnaissance and radio relay, a light fixed-wing aircraft such as the Cessna 185 or Bosbok, usually called a ‘Telstar’, might be sent over the battlefield to keep headquarters primed of developments. If necessary, a larger fixed-wing aircraft, such as a Dakota, would be brought into the mix for dropping a second wave of reserve troops by parachute, usually as a stopper group ahead of the target component. The role of the stopper group was to stop any enemy attempting to escape the attacking force by running in the opposite direction.

Because landmines had already become a feature of all of Southern Africa’s regional conflicts, surface movement remained problematical for the four decades that these military struggles lasted. Most of the unpaved roads in the South-West African operational area were mined and could rarely be negotiated at the speeds required to match helicopter assault operations. Also, the road infrastructure in the region was marginal at best. In southern Angola it was almost non-existent, with convoys heading north on cross-border raids making their own tracks through the primitive sand-covered terrain.

During the war, some of the most successful pre-planned attacks on the larger insurgent camps that involved Nellis, resulted from information gathered by aerial photography or by visual reconnaissance by fixed-wing aircraft. These methods became a feature of the conflict in the southern Angolan War. Alternatively, the Reconnaissance Regiment—the Recces— might be tasked to physically confirm that a specific camp was occupied by the enemy.

Operation Super in 1982 is still regarded as the single most successful heliborne assault of the war. An attacking force of only 34 troops, all of them members of 32 Battalion, was transported in at dawn by five Puma helicopters. Additional support came from four Alouette gunships, with Neall Ellis in overall control. The target was a remote SWAPO camp manned by more than 300 enemy troops. By the time the 90-minute firefight was over, 250 insurgents lay dead, for the loss of only four 32 Battalion troops.